Lie of the Land (17 page)

Getting back up to the broch appealed again, briefly. But it was nonsense, trying to rebuild it. It was insane.

He put the rifle parts back in their soft leather case. Alec John might know how to put the spring into the barrel.

•

There had been something unpleasant in Room 14. New sheets couldn't hide it; illness and the scent of death haunted the room, and he was glad to be out of it. He washed himself in the bathroom, in a few inches of lukewarm water.

At the top of the stairs, a moment passed before he registered exactly what Isaac was doing. The boy was in one of the vacant bedrooms, number 4, boring a hole in the plaster wall with a screwdriver. Carl watched for a spell as Isaac removed a handful of plaster chalk, put it in a cup, and went off to the bathroom, where he added a splash of water to the cup from the bath tap. With a teaspoon Isaac stirred the mixture, looking very pleased with his morning's work.

Carl coughed. For a split second a nervous smile made Isaac cute: he'd been discovered, and it was time to turn on the charm.

‘What're you doing?' said Carl, coming over and taking the cup out of the boy's hand. ‘What d'you think your mum will say to that, eh?'

With a fair degree of venom, Isaac kicked Carl sharply in the shin and ran for the door. Carl dropped the cup of sticky plaster mix and it smashed on the tiled bathroom floor.

‘Fucker,' he growled, clutching his shin.

Isaac bolted from the room, screaming for his mum. There were footsteps drumming up the stairs in response to the commotion.

‘What the hell is going on?' Simone shouted from the corridor.

Carl opened his mouth to bellow the truth, then paused. ‘I just dropped a cup of water,' he shouted back, his shin stinging. For once, the wee bugger had been wearing his shoes, worse luck. Carl stood blocking the doorway. He smiled at Simone.

‘Sorry. I didn't know Isaac was up here and he gave me a bit of a start. I dropped the cup on the floor.'

Isaac was hiding behind his mother.

‘Sorry about that, wee man,' said Carl. ‘Didn't mean to give you a fright.' He smiled again at Simone. ‘And sorry for swearing, eh? Shouldn't use that kind of language around a wee kid.'

‘I'm not wee,' said Isaac, peeping round his mother's thigh.

‘Of course you're not, darling,' she soothed.

‘I'm not wee,' the boy repeated, eyeing Carl.

Carl shrugged, still standing in the doorway. ‘Yeah, okay. You're not wee.'

Simone nodded, none too convinced by the explanation of what had happened. She looked at Isaac, then back at Carl. ‘Pavel's coming round to play in a while,' she said to her son. ‘Come on.'

‘Oh,' said Carl. ‘Don't bother cooking any food for me tonight, I'm going over to Terry's.'

For a second, Simone allowed her face to fall, then pinned it back into a position of fixed blankness. ‘Thanks for telling me,' she said, shooing Isaac downstairs. ‘You're a very polite and thoughtful man, I'm sure.'

Isaac was a cute kid – Carl could see that. He had all the right attributes for cuteness, which he used to good effect: cherubic smile, big brown eyes, tousled mop of sandy hair. But when he didn't get his own way, the kid could also be a temperamental little shit. Angel and devil. Or maybe Carl couldn't see the good, just the bad. People never really pay much attention to a kid that's sitting nicely or playing quietly.

George, as granddad, did his best to jolly the boy along, but there were limits to the guy's patience. Sometimes his temper would go and he would just snap, usually over something trivial. At other times George could tolerate the worst tantrums in the kid. The man was doing his best to deal with his own stuff, and he
had bad days when he had no patience. It must make it easier for George, having his daughter and grandson to fill the void.

He set off for Terry's.

It was all fucked up. Right to the very edge of the redzone was 2.26 miles. Maybe he could live in a tent, high in the hills where no one except Alec John ever went. He could live there until the nearest SCOPE mast failed. That's what he would do. Then, when the masts started to stop working he would . . . What?

Walk another ten or twenty miles until he came to a dead village? There was bound to be another Inverlair out there, another prison shelter. There would be lots of empty houses, for sure. Desiccated corpses in their beds or slumped at the kitchen table. He could make his way south – a wanderer in the silence, following the masts as they packed in, until he got to the Channel; then he'd find a boat, or a magic fucking carpet to take him to the land of milk and honey.

For the first time since before his illness, he'd walked around the bay, and through the village, entirely by road. When he reached Terry's, and without really knowing why, Carl blurted out the truth about Simone.

‘Christ, you didn't hang about there.'

Carl shook his head. ‘It wasn't like that. It was strange. My third night here and she came up to ask if I wanted anything to eat, and it just happened.' He sniffed. ‘We just wanted to hold each other, I suppose, then . . .' He shrugged. ‘It sounds stupid . . . but it didn't feel like sex – real sex, I mean. Not with a spraysuit – not remote, but connected.'

Terry grinned.

‘Fuck off,' muttered Carl.

A plastic Coke bottle was produced. Even in the dim light of the oil lamp Carl could see that it did not contain Coke. Terry poured two mugs of Hendrik and Maganda's cloudy home-brew.

‘Actually, it doesn't sound stupid,' he said. ‘I swam out to the
buoy at Heron Point the day after SCOPE happened, after I'd run into the redzone as far as I could. Nose was streaming blood, and I just ran down to the water, stripped off, and dived straight in off the rocks.'

He adjusted the flame of the oil lamp. ‘So what are you going do about Simone?' He flashed an edgy grin. ‘You could always run away.' He coughed and started laughing; took another draw of his spliff and passed it over. ‘God knows when I'll get my next shag.' Before the evening progressed any further, Terry thought it a good idea to check what he had for breakfast the next day. If the cupboard was bare he could cadge an couple of eggs off Maganda, but he saw there was some mackerel left and the bag of peanuts he'd found earlier. That would be enough. He could at least satisfy that appetite.

19

‘It's funny, but you still expect to offer someone a cup of tea when they call on you,' said Alec John sheepishly.

Carl shrugged. ‘It would be nice, I suppose.'

‘Yes,' said Alec John. ‘I gave the last teabag to Maganda yesterday to put on her veg; I must have squeezed a dozen cups out of it.'

Of course: Alec John was one of the lucky few, an essential worker.

‘How many teabags do the committee give you?'

‘Three a week. I think they're getting pretty low on supplies now.' He smiled at Carl. ‘I've always been fond of a brew.' He lifted his cap and smoothed his greying hair back. ‘I have to admit that I do miss it when I don't have it.'

Carl stiffened. ‘If that's all you miss then you're doing well.'

Alec John went through to the kitchen. He'd witnessed too many traumatic scenes over the last few months, and now he knew when to stay silent. He rummaged in a cupboard, searching for a distraction.

While Alec John was through in the kitchen, Carl looked around the small low-ceilinged living room. The place was dark, with only a small window facing the bay. On the deep windowsill there was an old ice-cream carton, half full of loose change. A tea towel depicting Morecambe Bay had been draped neatly across one end of a drop-leaf table. Carl guessed that Alec John sat there to eat, alone at the window, looking out over the bay. Framed photos, some of them black-and-white, hung on the wall, which looked as if it could use a lick of paint. Above the fireplace a
wooden mantel clock sat, its hands frozen behind dirty glass at twenty past two. Carl leant closer, but heard no ticking within. More photos next to it. Among the clutter on the dark wooden sideboard there was a toy car, a metallic blue Mercedes, still in its box.

‘You don't strike me as a fan of toy cars,' Carl called through to the kitchen.

‘It's a bit of a relic, that,' Alec John said, abandoning his search for an early lunch. ‘For my fiftieth birthday someone asked me what my favourite car was. It was Allan Robertson's son, he left Inverlair to . . .' Alec John paused. ‘Anyway, he turned up at the door on my birthday and said come outside and see your new Merc.' He laughed. ‘And there it was sitting on top of a fence post.'

Alec John turned a log over in the open fire. Warmth flooded into the room as the wood's red-hot underside was exposed.

‘Terry said you might want me to help you with something.'

‘Well,' said Alec John, ‘you've been using his uncle's old air rifle, so I thought you might want to spend a day on the hill, see how you are with the real thing.'

‘What – shooting? Shooting animals?'

There was a glint in the stalker's eye. ‘No, clouds – for the sheer hell of it.'

‘Oh,' said Carl, abashed. ‘Right.'

Alec John grunted, left the room. ‘Come or don't come. It's up to you.'

‘But I've never fired a proper gun. Never even held one.'

The stalker came back with a few gutted mackerel in a plastic bag. He put a blackened frying pan on top of the stove. ‘You can learn. There's more to being a keeper than just firing a gun – a lot more, especially now that every animal matters to us. But that's nothing you need worry about for now.'

‘Listen,' said Carl. ‘I don't suppose you know how to get a spring piston back into an air rifle. It came out yesterday.'

‘Aye, there's a tool for it, but I don't have one. I can make something that does the job, though. Did you take the spring out?'

Carl nodded.

Alec John narrowed his eyes. ‘What did you use?'

‘A screwdriver.'
‘You're lucky you never lost an eye.'

Carl nodded. ‘Bloody thing tore a lump out of the wall.'

Alec John uncorked a wine bottle and poured oil into the frying pan. ‘Where would we be without Adam Cutler?' he said as the oil spat. ‘Our Lord and Protector. Do you want some mackerel?'

Carl laughed. ‘You're not his biggest fan then.'

A grimace was the answer. ‘Always been a bit full of himself,' said Alec John. ‘Thinks he's lord of the manor. Tried to suck up to the Arabs, whenever they flew in.'

‘Arabs?'

‘The estate owners, from Kuwait.'

‘Did they like to shoot?'

‘Oh yes,' said Alec John, turning the sizzling fillets. ‘But they didn't have the patience to stalk for long or do a spot of fishing. They got fed up quickly. So it was five minutes in the chopper up onto the hill, half an hour to kill the beast, then down to the big house. It's no big deal to shoot a red deer when you've shot elephants and tigers.'

From a cupboard, Alec John took out a small yellow block of waxy polycarb and cut it in two. ‘The committee let me keep this.' One wedge he placed on Carl's plate, the other on his own, along with some cottage cheese from an old margarine tub and the fish from the frying pan. ‘Wasn't that kind of them?'

Carl agreed. ‘Generous to a fault.' He cut a slice of polycarb. It was bland and rubbery in his mouth. And there was something about it he didn't trust. It was the last of the old man's supply. But it was carbohydrate.

As he ate, Carl noticed a framed photo of a young woman,
long-haired and laughing. An obvious question occurred to him which, in his former universe, he would have come right out and asked. But this time his curiosity, the habitual probing, slipped out of gear and into neutral. There was no article here. No need to probe. There was very obviously no Mrs Stoddart around the house, and there could be any number of reasons for that. There was no need to find out the answer right now, so he left the question unasked. They spoke about Glasgow and white rust. And about Howard and SCOPE.

Finishing his food, Alec John wiped his mouth and laid knife and fork neatly together on the empty plate. It had been difficult for them not to gulp the food down.

‘I've got to go to the boatyard for more biodiesel, and to see if they've fixed the argocat.'

Carl grunted, finished his own food, felt warmth spreading in his limbs. ‘What time do you want me to turn up tomorrow?'

‘If the weather's half decent, about nine. We're well into November now so it'll be getting dark mid-afternoon, though we can't go that far into the hills any more.' He took the dirty plates through to the kitchen and plopped them in the basin. ‘Casper said he'd have the argocat fixed by today.'

They left the house and walked down the track together towards the main road. Carl squinted at the pitched corrugated roof of a stone shed, surrounded by nettles and bramble bushes, that stood at the bottom of the track.

‘Have a guess how old the roof is.'

Carl shook his head. ‘Dunno – thirty, forty years?'

‘My grandfather put it on, not long after the First World War. He got the corrugated iron second-hand from Glasgow.'

Carl eyed Alec John. ‘Is that what you used to tell the tourists?'

‘If they asked me, yes.'

‘And it's really that old?'

‘It is.'

‘It looks in a bad way.'

‘Well,' said Alec John. ‘Round the edges maybe, but it's dry enough inside.'

‘You never thought of putting new iron on?'

‘No. Why?'

Carl shrugged. ‘I don't know. Some people might say it doesn't look good.'

‘And who was going to see it?'

Carl raised his eyebrows. ‘The tourists?'

They turned down into the gorse and alder-lined lane towards the main road. ‘If it was a shiny, new roof,' said Alec John, ‘do you think the tourists would have stopped to take a photo of it?'